


while we all pretend to sleep

by fructose



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Aliens, Ghost Towns, Lights, M/M, Road Trips, Strange things, The Desert, alternative universe - they lost the show, and have sex in their van, and they live back East, car radios, crop circles, scenery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 21:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13644984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fructose/pseuds/fructose
Summary: Ryan hears about a town in the Southwest, Shane takes him there.They drove across the southern point of Nevada over two slow days, traversing that jagged shard of rock and dust with the static from the radio as their soundtrack. It crackled on even as Ryan pressed his hand between Shane’s legs, leaning over as they drove to growl obscene things in his ear. It was the white noise that played on as Ryan jerked Shane off in the back of the van, their bodies pressed close and hot.





	while we all pretend to sleep

It was meant to be a road trip, a there-and-back-again for Ryan to stretch his legs, to see some familiar ground after being away for so long. When they lost the show they moved East _for a change, it’ll be good for us_. But New York just made them mad at each other, Philly made them jumpy. So they went to back to Chicago, where Shane put down his roots, anchored Ryan along with him.

Shane had nodded when Ryan suggested the trip,  _Let’s go see how the Southwest’s doing, you and me_ , and had placed placating hands of Ryan’s shoulders, against his neck. He’d kissed the nervous curl of Ryan’s lips until the shaking subsided, muttering quiet words of solicitude into the hot air between them.

They planned a route that wound its way around the big cities, snaking between the bigger towns. The rural roads were wide and long and Shane could see Ryan settling with every mile they put between themselves and the bustle of Chicago.

“There’s this town I wanna visit,” Ryan said one day as they rested on the edge of a soybean field, the brown stalks thick at their backs. “I’ve heard about it, this place back home.”

“Sure,” Shane said. “Whatever you like, man.”

They passed through a town that night and stopped for a drink in a bar with pictures of crop circles above the bottles of half-full optics.

“We saw those today, huh?” Ryan said, indicating the grainy pictures with his glass of beer.

“Did we?”

Ryan nodded. “I did, in the soybeans.”

Shane nodded, peering up at the pictures. “What did they look like?”

“Like a sign,” Ryan said, “pointing towards the Pacific.”

“That’s comforting.”

Ryan grinned.

 

They drove away through the dark night after that, and though the pinpoints of street lights faded in the distance behind them, the glow of that human place lingered in a grey haze on the horizon for miles.  Ahead of them stretched the dark of the plains, the black fields and the black sky and the spill of stars above them.

They stopped on the side of the road to rest, and when the van’s headlights were turned off the darkness was so enveloping that they could have been lost at sea. Floating among some black wreckage like La Salle, like Shackleton, like Smith.

Ryan got nervous, his laugh edging into hysteria when Shane had turned out the lights. He scrabbled around in the back and shuddered up against Shane, whining, “I don’t like it, man, I don’t like it.”

So Shane had pushed him down in the little space they had, shuffling until he was between Ryan’s hot thighs, his legs up around Shane’s shoulders, the tips of his toes brushing the grey roof. Shane ate Ryan out until he was panting, his arm thrown across his face, then he sucked him off hard and fast, swallowing the mess that Ryan made. He rucked up Ryan's t-shirt and pressed his cheek against the calming flutter of Ryan's stomach, his breathing still loud in the dark.

“Now go to sleep,” Shane said, pulling himself up so that he was beside Ryan. “Go to sleep, ok?”

Ryan nodded, safe in the soft cabin of their little ship, bobbing gently through the night.

 

They drove through Colorado and into Utah, through the conifers and the rocks. Shane thought it looked like an alien planet that humans had only partially managed to terraform, the wild rock poking through the green surface.

The closer they got to the desert the more time Ryan spent trying to tune the old radio, a black box slightly too small for the hole in the dash.

“This radio sucks,” Ryan said with a huff one morning, shutting the thing off altogether.

Shane shrugged. “It’s a replacement, I got it free.”

“Well, it sucks,” Ryan said, crossing his arms.

Shane laughed, small and low. “You need to take a break?”

Ryan stuck out his lip, then smiled. “Yeah, man. I could go for a coffee.”

“Frisco’s coming up.”

Ryan nodded, turning to look out at the long road.

 

They drove across the southern point of Nevada over two slow days, traversing that jagged shard of rock and dust with the static from the radio as their soundtrack. It crackled on even as Ryan pressed his hand between Shane’s legs, leaning over as they drove to growl obscene things in his ear. It was the white noise that played on as Ryan jerked Shane off in the back of the van, their bodies pressed close and hot.

In the day the desert had twisters that spiralled up from the ground, gold dust devils that wound their way around the van as they drove; their little blue box between the yellow sands.

The purple dusk descended each night and with each bright morning they stirred. They pissed in the shallow ditches at the side of the long roads and brushed their teeth with a rolled tube of toothpaste and bottles of gas station water.

They drove through towns as quick as they could, stopping to buy Fruit Roll-Ups and bags of nuts and cans of Yoo-hoo that got too warm in the back of the van. They’d eat a quick breakfast at a diner on those days, keeping their eyes averted from the people around them, trying their best to ignore the placid stares. Ryan said that they were being watched even when there was no one around; he said he could feel eyes on him, against the backs of his thighs and around his neck, pressing against his extremities tight and constricting.

Shane would nod, letting his eyes scan the dusty sky, before walking back to the van in silence.

Sometimes they would see lights in the night sky, too high for aircraft, and they’d speak about what you might see if you were looking down from four hundred kilometres up; the endless desert just a brown smudge, vast oceans nothing but a dark swatch of blue. Unseen figures like mites on skin, hidden among earthen pores, huddled around knots of electric lights spread out across the globe like neurons, surrounded by the glia of their rural spaces.

 

The radio finally crackled to life as they entered Death Valley. They had both jumped, staring at the black box of the radio as a gentle voice crackled out:

“The Arctic is lit by the midnight sun. The surface of the moon is lit by the face of the earth. Our little town is lit, too, by lights just above that we cannot explain.”

“That’s it,” Ryan said gleefully, pointing at the radio and grinning wide at Shane. “That’s the place!”

Shane nodded, listening for a moment. “They’ve seen the lights too?” he said at last.

Ryan beamed at him.

 

That night they saw the lights again, a blurred white set of points in the sky like a set of skittles; they spun down from above and chased along by the side of the van like a pod of dolphins leaping in the wake of a ship.

Ryan and Shane hollered, whooping as they watched them.

“Stop!” Ryan shouted gleefully. “Stop the car!”

“No! No, no.” Shane was smiling wide, his teeth white in the darkness.

The lights blazed, a sudden burst of blinding brilliance, and then they were gone.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read this before in a different fandom, I apologise, couldn't resist reworking it for Unsolved (◕‿◕✿)


End file.
